h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

no one would call there kid sh*thead...would they.

Apparently someone called their child "Chlamydia" because they thought it was a flower.

The rumour/joke/story I've heard is that it's pronounced Shi-THEED.

There's a whole bunch more on the "Real People with funny names" thread... (or is that threed?)

Chlamydia... well, it *does* sound a bit like a flower... Giles Brandreth wrote once about the categories of words... Those with nice sound/nasty meaning, nice sound/nice meaning etc. I had such fun putting them into categories...

Nice sound/nice meaning
Euphony
Loveliness
Jasmine

Nice sound/nasty meaning
Diahroea (sp?)
Chlamydia
Meconium (there's a story about the Pacific Island mother who heard a doctor say the word when her son was born, and said "oh, that sounds nice...)
Colitis

Nasty sound/nice meaning
Can't think of any... Contributions, please! (Of course, it is subjective.)

Phlegmatic?

Asafoetida.

RF

OH---MY---BOB!!!



I had never heard the word meconium before...

I just looked it up...








Did you ever listen to that Beatles song, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds... did you catch that line about "the girl with colitis rode by"?




The funniest word I ever looked up in a dictionary in high school was priapism. I still think it makes a nice epithet.

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It does indeed!

I bet its not so funny for those who suffer from it, even though many of us might aspire to sporting a permanent 'horn'.

My sister is a primary school teacher in a school on a sink estate near Liverpool. One year there was a girl in her class named 'Stella'. Her parents said they'd named her after the lager.

The man who worked in our local kebab shop called his daughter "Donna".

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Oh, my...

Safeways supermarkets are being converted to Morrison's, following a takeover.

The only (known) reference to Safeways in a song lyric is in 'St. Dominic's Preview'....by Van Morrison.

Bitrex is the most bitter substance yet discovered.

Bitrex can be detected by taste at 10ppb and is recognisably bitter at 50ppb.

I think one of the uses of Bitrex is as an additive in poisonous substances. It is so disgusting that anybody drinking the poison will immediately spit it out. It is also used by retreating armies to destroy food that they are not able to take with them, so that it will not be used by the enemy.

i can verify that it is pretty bitter, i have a wierd habit of getting drunk then finding anything as a challenge so one day i was reading a bottle of stardrops(?) a cleaning fluid that contains bitrex as a deterrent to kids well it said on the bottle (contains bitrex the most bitter substance known to man or dummit well i then went "that sounds like a challenge" and drank half a bottle not only did it make my face cave in from the bitterness of it all but i threw up for the rest of the night

that would because youre not supposed to drink it!!

yeah hence the addition of bitrex

and saying its the bitterest thing ever made me take their challenge

once i challenged the fella on trainspotting to a drinking competition, (go figure) then i drank drambue which was more icky and horrid then stardrops

Has anyone tried the Indian vegetable Karelia - also known as bitter gourd? A friend served them stuffed the other night. An acquired taste. Some people can't eat them at all.

Speaking of Stardrops - has anyone else noticed the similarity between the smell of Windowlene and the taste of Scweppes Russchian? Maybe they should market Windowlene as 'Russchian Smoothie'.

jack and bitter lemon is a lovely drink but once because the pub we were in had no botter lemon they just gave us half a lemon to squeeze in and it wound up tasting like sweat